“My God!” he whispered.  He drew his automatic swiftly from his pocket, and, pressed against the wall beside the window, looked about him as a man looks who finds himself surrounded by enemies.  Not a sound disturbed the stillness of the garden except for sibilant rustlings of the leaves, occasioned by a slight breeze.

Paul Harley retreated step by step to the bushes.  He held the pistol tightly clenched in his right hand.

He had heard his own death sentence pronounced and he knew that it was likely to be executed.

CHAPTER XIX.  WHAT HAPPENED TO HARLEY—­CONCLUDED

He regained the curve of the drive without meeting any opposition.  There, slipping the pistol into his pocket, he climbed rapidly up the tree from which he had watched the arrival of the three cars, climbed over the wall, and dropped into the weed jungle beyond.  He crept stealthily forward to the gap where he had concealed the racer, drawing nearer and nearer to the bushes lining the lane.  Only by a patch of greater darkness before him did he realize that he had reached it.  But when the realization came one word only he uttered:  “Gone!”

His car had disappeared!

Despair was alien to his character:  A true Englishman, he never knew when he was beaten.  Beyond doubt, now, he must accept the presence of hidden enemies surrounding him, of enemies whose presence even his trained powers of perception had been unable to detect.  The intensity of the note of danger which he had recognized now was fully explained.  He grew icily cool, master of his every faculty.  “We shall see!” he muttered, grimly.

Feeling his way into the lane, he set out running for the highroad, his footsteps ringing out sharply upon the dusty way.  The highroad gained, he turned, not to the left, but to the right, ran up the bank and threw himself flatly down upon it, lying close to the hedge and watching the entrance to the lane.  Nothing appeared; nothing stirred.  He knew the silence to be illusive; he blamed himself for having ventured upon such a quest without acquainting himself with the geography of the neighbourhood.

Great issues often rest upon a needle point.  He had no idea of the direction or extent of the park land adjoining the highroad.  Nevertheless, further inaction being out of the question, creeping along the grassy bank, he began to retreat from the entrance to the lane.  Some ten yards he had progressed in this fashion when his hidden watchers made their first mistake.

A faint sound, so faint that only a man in deadly peril could have detected it, brought him up sharply.  He crouched back against the hedge, looking behind him.  For a long time he failed to observe anything.  Then, against the comparatively high tone of the dusty road, he saw a silhouette—­the head and shoulders of someone who peered out cautiously.

Still as the trees above him he crouched, watching, and presently, bent forward, questing to right and left, questing in a horribly suggestive animal fashion, the entire figure of the man appeared in the roadway.